Archive for April, 2015

Announcement:
Systems Associates, Inc. (“SAI”) has officially announced the establishment of Synergy Software Systems/Deyafa (“Deyafa”) as their exclusive distributor of SynergyMMS in the Middle East/Africa & Indian Ocean.

Synergy Software Systems, based in Dubai, UAE, has been in business for almost 25 years and many members of their staff have extensive experience in the hospitality industry with major hospitality groups across the region. Deyafa Systems is dedicated to the Hospitality sector and represents Synergy Software Systems solutions with their full technical backing.

SAI collaborates with Deyafa for its Synergy MMS solution for the MEA region, and their team is trained and certified by SAI to meet the needs of their customers in the region. Deyafa has demonstrated the professionalism that SAI also strives to deliver and SAI is aconfident that the MEA/IO market will enjoy the advantage of their expertise and long experience together with Deyafa’s local presence.

Effective May 1, 2015, Deyafa will wholly manage the sales, implementation, training, billing and Tier 1 technical support for SynergyMMS in MEA/IO. SAI remains in close partnership with Deyafa to provide Tier 2 technical support as required.

SAI look forward to our continued relationship with its MEA clients and welcome Deyafa to offer combined efforts in support of SynergyMMS.

In the next few days, Synergy MMS clients you will receive a communication from Deyafa containing contact and other account-related information. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at your convenience.

The cost effective, cloud based Keyed-In solution for project management , is now even better value for money.

KeyedIn Projects Version 5.8. This is our biggest release to date offering new features and improvements to existing features, including:
• Auto scheduling and auto emailing of reports
• Single sign-on
• Drill down on widgets with image and PDF output options
• Individual widget configurations now available at different levels in the project hierarchy
• Re-engineered strategic resourcing interface including the option to edit supply in-line
• Forecasting using named resources as well as roles
• New project deliverables tab with more graphical user interface
• Major report writer improvements including “OR” filters
• Report preview now available during custom report creation
• Enhanced task Gantt printing
• Editable grids on resource and project administration
• De-centralised administration support allowing projects to be added into your own security group
• Safari and IE 11 support
• XLXS output for Excel
• Multi-currency QuickBooks integration
Non Opt-in Features:
Please note, a number of new features are mandatory and will be visible to all users once the upgrade has taken place. These include:
• Editable grids for Project and Resource admin screens
• Highlighted hyperlinks
• Task Gantt Printing
• Capability Tab – Navigation changes
• New Fields on Timesheet Approval and Submissions
• XLXS output for Excel

It also includes the additional fixes that were added post CU11 Hotfix 4:
• Ability to exclude NP rows from exporting to Excel by disabling the export of formulas
• Ability to export NP rows at the Account and Transaction detail levels
• Additional fixes for exporting to Excel where you would receive an operand error when exporting with formulas enabled
• Additional fixes for product defects

Template Studio:
• Template Actions allow users to dynamically navigate from one template to another. For example, users can click on a high level chart in one template and have another template automatically opened.Document Explorer:
• Enhanced Folder security to be more consistent with Windows 7 file security
• Ability to drag and drop folders (and the files in the folders)
• Ability to add a folder as a FavoriteSupporting Details
• New option to show only Line Item Schedules with a non-zero Adjustment lineTask Log:
• Improved access to the Task Log – users can access the task log from Detailed Planning Manager
• Ability to maximize and resize the task log
• Ability to stop the auto refresh (the new default setting) and to change the refresh frequency (every 10, 30, or 60 seconds)
• Ability to filter the task log based on the values displayed in any column

If you need a World class CPM solution that is productized with parameters for rapid installation and ease of use for the office of the CFO then contact us for more details and see the many related posts on this site.

What a great day.
A packed conference programme, with peep into the Ax ’7′ – Rainier – future for Dynamics Ax in an iconic venue, and the chance to catch up with so many people.
Microsoft Partner Account Manager, Ali Camci, in discussion with Synergy Software Systems Dynamics BDM, Bikram and Synergy Software Systems’, Executive Director, Jennifer Vaz.
Synergy, as a platinum partner, gave a key note speech ‘Powerful insights with Dynamics Ax” that showed off the features of Enterprise Portal. SharePoint, Power View, Power Bi, with a final Power Bi “Day in the life of HR’ extended analysis given by Jennifer – who needs no more introduction. This triggered a constant stream of visitors to our stand to see the live Power View demo on the Surface Pro 3. As a bonus we also showed Microsoft’s newly acquired Denizen dashboard solution.

This followed on from a well received presentation from Ms Alya Harbi of the Ministry of Health who managed to combine enthusiasm and clarity with a short sharp presentation of how Dynamics Ax is helping with the management and coordination of the logistics functions of multiple hospitals, clinics, and departments across the UAE.

Server 2005 is about to ride off into the sunset. Before support ends on April 12, 2016, you’ll need a plan to migrate any remaining instances of SQL Server 2005. What about security? For the last 5 years of “extended support”, users have continued to receive free security updates but beyond that had to pay for all non-security updates and support. Next year, support ends completely, meaning no more hotfixes or security updates and therefore potential exposure to security vulnerabilities.

A database currently attached to an instance of SQL Server 2005 could be either backed up (or detached), and later restored (or attached) on top of an instance of SQL Server 2014, and SQL Server 2014 won’t complain as it typically did in the past when you tried to restore (or attach) databases across database engines more distant than n-2 major versions.

With SQL Server 2014, it is possible and supported by the Setup code, to do an in-place upgrade of an existing instance of SQL Server 2005 without having to upgrade it first to any intermediate version (2008/2008R2/2012) which would put it in the n-2 range.

The supportability of those upgrade methods (backup/restore, detach/attach, or in-place upgrade) are documented in the “SQL Server 2014 Support for SQL Server 2005” section of the Supported Version and Edition Upgrades topic in he documentation.

And there is a note in it which reads “When a SQL Server 2005 database is upgraded to SQL Server 2014, the database compatibility level will be changed from 90 to 100. (In SQL Server 2014, valid values for the database compatibility level are 100, 110 and 120.)”

When a database is upgraded from a previous version to SQL Server 2014, there’s an upgrade process which sequentially executes a chain of upgrade processes to get it from whatever version it was, up to what the storage engine in 2014 is coded to work with. The more recent the version of the legacy database is the lesser processes will have to be executed during that upgrade phase.

Assuming your starting version is SQL Server 2005, it will execute (as far as the compatibility level upgrade goes):
1.one function (the one that would bring it to the SQL Server 2008/2008R2 level) which upgrades the compatibility level of the database to 80 if it was set to a value lower than that. Or to 100 if the database being upgraded is either TEMPDB or MODEL (these cases only happen during an in-place upgrade)
2.one function (the one that would bring it to the SQL Server 2012 level) which upgrades the compatibility level of the database to 90 if it was set to a value lower than that. Or to 110 if the database being upgraded is either TEMPDB or MODEL
3.one function (the one that would bring it to the SQL Server 2014 level) which upgrades the compatibility level of the database to 100 if it was set to a value lower than that. Or to 120 if the database being upgraded is either TEMPDB or MODEL

So, for example, if your database in SQL Server 2005 had its compatibility level set to 70 or 80, and you don’t bump it up before upgrading it to SQL Server 2014, then the upgrade process will do it for you.

Microsoft recently announced the acquisition of Datazen, a startup that took the concept of business intelligence and tried to make it more user-friendly with sharp design.

“Datazen is a mobile-first company at the forefront of this wave, with enterprise customers around the globe using its technology,” writes Microsoft’s Kamal Hathi in a blog entry.

Microsoft will use it to beef up Power BI the first product Microsoft released after Satya Nadella took over as CEO, and it is one of the big examples of Nadalla’s vision to “reinvent” productivity.

The strategy is simple: Power BI is run from Microsoft’s data centers as a cloud application. Datazen is designed to be installed at a customer’s site, on their own servers or in their own data center, and to be accessed from any device, from smartphones to PCs. This way, Microsoft can offer both varieties while sacrificing neither, and all of Datazen’s current software and apps will remain available in their current form, according to a post on Datazen’s website. PowerBI and Datazen will integrate more and more tightly as time goes on.

Current Microsoft SQL Server customers can download Datazen for no additional cost right now.

From a design perspective, Datazen furthers Microsoft’s new commitment to acquiring well-designed and visually appealing applications that people enjoy using, as seen with recent app purchases Sunrise and Acompli (now renamed Outlook for iOS).

“Our ambitions went beyond a laundry list of product features; we wanted everyone to enjoy and look forward to using Datazen as a part of their daily routine.” writes Datazen CEO Miljan Braticevic in his blog entry.

Microsoft sees this as a tremendous growth area, and it quickly gaining the tools and the technology to lock this market down.

The Microsoft company released SQL Server Service Pack 1 (SP1) on the April 15 anniversary of the database software’s launch. A bug surfaced soon after the release of SQL Server 2014′s first service pack, forcing Microsoft to temporarily disable downloads of the update.

“The SQL SSIS team has found an issue with SP1 installation when an SSIS catalog is present in the SQL Server instance,” Currently, clicking on the Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP1 download links generates a Website error page. When the links are restored, customers can expect to see many of their issues addressed and squeeze more performance out of their SQL Server implementations.

Well the gloomy new is that Global IT spend is set to shrink by 1.3% in 2015: Gartner
The revised outlook is due largely to effects of the rising US dollar, it says.
Surprisingly perhaps its also predicted that Mobile software usage is about to plateau.
Meanwhile the mantra is cloud, mobility, social, predictive Big data analytics, wearable gadgets -(Apple phone) and the ‘Internet of things’.
We see a major shakeout of Dynamics Ax partners – the product has outgrown many. a broader deeper set of functionality and technologies results in more challenging projects, and the need for a different partner size and skill structure while meanwhile the cloud is changing revenue and cash flow cycles and sustainable business models.
We are happy to confirm that Synergy’s business focus and operations, is well suited to this new business paradigm and Microsoft Dynamics continues to be a year on year growing sector for us. A 100% local UAE team, and exceptional support, and mature consultants provides the platform.
If you are seeking partner for today, that consistently delivers, and will be there to support your future business growth then call us on 0097143365589.

Microsoft recently revealed that it’s officially ending Internet Explorer (IE) with the launch of Windows 10.
IE will be replaced by the streamlined new Project Spartan browser.
Many will not miss IE, and maybe sceptical that Project Spartan is anything more than IE with a new coat of paint.

However, the one thing Project Spartan really needs to capture market share has little to do with the browser itself: it just needs to be cross-platform.

Microsoft has already conceded the cross-platform war. Its recent strategy of offering OneNote, followed by the full Microsoft Office productivity suite, on iOS and Android mobile devices has been effective. Last week, it added its Office Lens app for iOS and Android to extend the ability to scan documents and whiteboards from a mobile device on rival platforms. It needs to adopt that same all-inclusive mindset with Project Spartan.

Project Spartan cannot be a Windows-only browser like IE. Microsoft needs to make Project Spartan for Mac OS X, Project Spartan for iOS, Project Spartan for Android–maybe even Project Spartan for Linux. Much of the value of a browser today lies in the ability to open a tab in the browser on your PC and pick up where you left off from your smartphone while you’re on the go.

People expect tabs, bookmarks, and even logins and passwords to be seamlessly synced.
People want a browser experience that remains consistent no matter on which device or platform they’re working.

IE once enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the browser market. Firefox and Chrome–and to a lesser extent Apple’s Safari–have eaten away at that dominance. IE still has more market share than all of those rivals combined, but its 90+% market share dwindled to just over 50%. Even that figure is debatable, because it depends on how you measure the browser market. There are metrics that suggest Chrome is more popular than IE.

Part of that is driven simply by the browser itself. Firefox and Chrome both have, dynamic ecosystems of extensions and plug-ins that enable the browser experience to be customized and to be more powerful than the off-the-shelf browser itself.

IE also has add-ons available, but they’ve never had the loyal following of Firefox and Chrome.

IE has had its share of security and performance issues. With IE, there has been a sustained campaign of negative marketing and media attention. An entire generation hates IE and refuses to use it, and they don’t even really know why. They just know that everyone says you should avoid IE.

Project Spartan can help Microsoft start fresh. It can reinvent the Microsoft browser as a more flexible and efficient browser experience. It can shed the negative stigma of the IE brand. It will all be for nothing, though, if Microsoft doesn’t also make Project Spartan available as a cross-platform browser that enables users to keep tabs and bookmarks synced and remain productive as they switch from Windows PC, to iPhone, to Android tablet.

The DIFC sent out a reminder on the deadlines of the Health Insurance Law No.11 of Dubai requiring firms to ensure all employees are covered for health insurance by an authorized insurance company.
• Companies with 100 to 1,000 employees will have to comply before 30th July 2015
• Companies with less than 100 employees will have to comply before 30th June 2016
Fines may be applied to those firms that do not comply with the law.

In future the health insurance will be linked to the applications for a new visa and/or visa renewal

Microsoft’s flagship operating system operates quite differently from Linux—which looks to be be a problem as containers become the preferred way of computing in the cloud. Microsoft is reshaping Windows. Last year Microsoft announced that it would add Linux-like container technology to a future version of Windows. Now, the company has revealed that it’s also developing a super-slim version Windows Server Nano.
that will run what it describes as a new kind of container that provides an added level of security.

According to Microsoft spokesman Mike Schutz, the company is building a way of wrapping containers in its Hyper-V “virtualization” technology, so that they’re completely isolated from each other.

But the real news seems to be that Microsoft will offer a stripped-down operating system along the lines of CoreOS, a Linux operating system that’s particularly suited to running containers across a large number of computers. This kind of operating system represents the future of online services, which necessarily run on hundreds or even thousands of machines—or what industry marketers like to call the cloud.

Under new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft is revamping its technologies to suit the way the world is moving. Today’s Windows is such a large operating system that you need time to deploy it across many machines. In an age when you can so easily push Linux operating systems like CoreOS onto a vast array of computer servers, Windows is behind.

So its important that Windows Server Nano will offer containers to provides a way of encapsulating software so that developers and businesses can more efficiently move these containers from machine to machine, and also squeeze many of these onto the same machine, to take advantage of unused computing power.

The added security Microsoft provides with its “Hyper-V containers” is something that will appeal to only some organizations, such as government agencies that have extreme security requirements. Some agencies may need a way of tightly securing individual containers because they’re running alongside containers from other agencies. Regulations often require agencies to maintain complete software separation.

Many organizations now run containers atop public cloud computing services such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and that means they end up sharing computers with each other – containers run atop virtual machines, which provide the needed security.

The Hyper-V containers don’t make much sense in this situation—a situation that represents the future. But Microsoft must also appeal to a wide range of businesses, including government agencies. It must serve a new audience without losing the old one.

At the recent Microsoft Convergence, Satya Nadella talked about the importance of culture in empowering individuals and organizations to use the latest technologies to transform their business.

vice president of Microsoft Dynamics CRM commented in his blog tht Dynamics CRM plays a key role in doing just that – by giving companies intelligent customer engagement solutions to deliver a customer experience that is: personalized, proactive and predictive.

Productivity. Every CRM vendor is trying to connect sales, service and marketing systems with their productivity tools, Microsoft makes this easier with deep and seamless integration of Dynamics CRM with Office 365. The new release includes an immersive Excel experience. A sales manager can perform ‘what if’ scenarios and update their forecasts right within CRM. OneNote in CRM, makes it much easier for sales teams to collaborate and to share information about accounts and opportunities.

Social. A reimagined social experience that goes beyond social listening and sentiment analysis to real social engagement. A social center lets your marketing, sales and service teams monitor social topics and engage directly with social communities.

Social analytics provides text mining, cloud visualization and a social activity map for interactive, global and real-time visibility into social activity.

The user interface for social is , beautiful, intuitive, and easy to use and data-rich with information at your fingertips

Mobile users interact with the same sales processes across all mobile devices. There is also a mobile SDK to extend apps and even to create your own mobile apps.

Analytics. PowerBI Connectors for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing provide out of the box integration. Sales, service and marketing professionals can analyze data with interactive dashboards and reports in Power BI,

Knowledge. The Spring ‘15 release marks the start of Parature’s integration with Dynamics CRM for knowledge management. Customer service agents will have knowledge integrated into their daily service interactions out of the box.

The Dynamics CRM tablet app can now be securely managed through Good Technology which provides a secure container for local data, secure data tunnel, and also manages secure email and web links from the Dynamics CRM tablet app. Organizations will can enforce central policy management such as: device wipe and password management and also enforce corporate policies for customer data, while still enabling employees to access the rich capabilities of the Dynamics CRM tablet app .

A new Microsoft acquisition from Fusion Software that is built on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform adds “voice of the customer” capabilities to CRM with new, rule-based, multi-channel enterprise feedback management capabilities. Companies can include customer feedback into service, sales and marketing engagements:
• Customer satisfaction surveys embedded into service interactions (support calls, etc.)
• Lead and opportunity qualification for sales
• Focus group and product offer feedback in marketing

Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the most competitive software segments, .

The Value Matrix looks at the advances in usability and functionality by vendors in the three core pillars of CRM: sales, marketing, and customer service.

Significant investments in usability and incremental growth in functionality have driven positioning changes since the last Matrix. In the usability vs functionality quadrant Dynamics CRM continues to be positioned in the leadership quadrant.

The Nucleus research highlights several trends impacting decision making in the CRM space :
Partnerships and acquisitions, and further integrating acquisitions
- Continuing investments in usability
- The Internet of things (IOT). With beacons, geofencing, and other IOT technologies becoming accessible, the CRM use cases for IOT has moved beyond early adopters to real applications leveraging customer data.
- The marketing technologist. Multichannel marketing and cloud marketing applications have made an aptitude for technology an important career-building factor for marketers e.g in sectors like social listening
- The rise of apps. Early will differentiate their engagement strategies with customer-facing custom applications. The key with toolkits and frameworks that accelerate application development and product evolution” Nucleus expects vendors wanting to maintain or improve their position in future editions of the Matrix will be
doing more to differentiate their apps approach so both internal teams and third-party developers will migrate toward their platform – and users and customers will follow. ” “Microsoft Dynamics CRM has improved usability and functionality, and extended features also by acquisition, thus maintaining its strong position in the Matrix”. Microsoft’s focus on helping clients to deliver exceptional customer experiences, by leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft technologies with ERP and Office integration, and cloud and on-premise options continues to make it an attractive option for organizations. Microsoft is continuing to integrate the
capabilities in social listening, customer care, and marketing brought in by acquisition over the past few years.

The Microsoft technology stack is also extending and integrating across its enterprise solutions for example Power Bi, and Yammer . In January Gartner commented on current and future Lync telephony adoption and recommendations for enterprise IT planners for evaluating how to integrate Lync in initiatives. The report states, “Gartner expects Microsoft Lync, as a telephony solution, to continue its rapid adoption rate, earning Microsoft a coveted top-three position as a global telephony provider by 2016.”

Dynamics CRM 2015 on 16September 2014 , seeks to better bridge the gap between sales and marketing. New features
include:
- a sales collaboration panel,
- a graphical e-mail editor,
- support for A/B testing,
- an interactive marketing calendar,
- support for product bundling and recommendations,
- an enhanced guided sales process,
- new mobile sales capabilities.
(Microsoft also added Italian as a sixth native language for social listening. )

Synergy is a well established, solution provider across the Middle East region.
Synergy has a strong presence in several key verticals; Manufacturing, Construction, Hospitality Insurance, Financial Services, Government. Media, Oil and Gas, Distribution.
Synergy is particularly well known as a Gold Partner of both Infor Sunsystems, and Microsoft Dynamics Ax and for its implementation expertise and exceptional support. It is based centrally in Dubai in the Karama district since it was registered in 1991, and occupies a 7,000 sq ft office with around 80 full time employees.